1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer software and, more particularly, to process tracking and recordation within a grid environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
A grid computing environment is a distributed computing environment where computing, application, storage, and/or network resources can be shared across geographically disperse organizations. An ideal grid computing environment allows flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, organizations, and resources. In the grid environment, a variety of computing resources that contribute to a virtual resource pool can be transparently utilized on an as-needed basis. Grid computing resources in the virtual resource pool can be treated as commodities or services, which can be consumed in a manner similar to the commercial consumption of electricity and water.
The concept of grid computing is intertwined with the concept of autonomic computing. That is, autonomic computing refers to computing systems that run themselves and are capable of high-level functioning while keeping the system's complexity invisible to human operators. Grid computing, on the other hand, can provide computing capacity and resources while obscuring from the consumer the machine-dependent details relating to the hardware that provides the computing capacity and resources.
While grid computing may presently be at an early stage in its evolution, several grid computing environments have been successfully implemented. One noteworthy implementation is the NC BioGrid Project that was successfully implemented in the fall of 2001 to enable researchers and educators throughout North Carolina to pool computing resources for use in sequencing genes and related genetic research. Other notable grid implementations include SETI@home, the Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL), and EUROGRID. Additionally, commercially available software products exist for establishing a customizable grid computing environment, such as Avaki's data grid from Avaki of Burlington, Maine and Grid MP Enterprise from United Devices of Austin, Tex. Further, a number of readily available toolkits and standards have been developed for creating a grid computing environment including, for example, the Globus Toolkit provided by the Globus project and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
One problem with existing grid computing environments relates to the logging or recordation of events. More specifically, within a grid environment, computer processes, applications, and users can utilize computing resources from many different hardware sources disposed across several computing grids. Therefore, no common location exists for logging system information. Without accurate system logs, system designers and administrators cannot determine which computing resources are consumed by individual computer processes, applications, and users. Accordingly, testing new grid applications, equitably allocating grid computing resources among a set of consumers, and maintaining computing grids can be exceptionally difficult.